This New Zealand offering may be the film for you if you are
looking for something very odd, but gentle.

Rob and Lucinda are a blissfully happy unmarried
couple who are running a dairy farm somewhere in New Zealand. They
have many spontaneous romantic interludes, take outdoor baths
together. etc. Rob is also the world's nicest guy. He loves his cows
and knows them all personally, and he refuses to put down his
agoraphobic dog, instead allowing the pet to live permanently under
three sides of a a cardboard box.

Rob proposes, Lucinda accepts, and their life seems
to exist in Eden.

Enter the serpent.

Lucinda's putative friend, Drosophilia, says that
Lucinda needs to test Rob to see if he really loves her. She ought
to do this before marrying him, because anybody can be sweet and
adorable and loving during the good times, but Rob might be a real
jerk when he is tested, and its better to find that out before
marriage. Of course, since Rob is not only the nicest guy in New
Zealand, but the ONLY guy living within hundreds of miles,
Drosophilia's real intention is to break up the happy couple and get
Rob for herself. You'd think enough women would have seen enough
movies or TV shows to make everyone aware of this trick, but I guess
they don't get out much in rural New Zealand.

NUDITY REPORT

Danielle Cormack shows a nipple in a bath.

Karl Urban shows his buns when he jumps into the
milk vat.

So far it
sounds like an episode of I Love Lucy, right?

Well, it won't stay that way, because
Lucinda goes to rather extreme lengths to see if Rob loves her, way
beyond anything Lucy would do to Ricky. For example, she cuts off
his nuts and feeds them to the wild dogs, but Rob just says "oh,
honey, you little kidder, you got some 'splainin' to do", and
smooches her.

OK, I made that up, but the stuff she
does is pretty much just as bad. For example, she starts by taking a
bath in some of his milk, thus destroying his finances and causing
him to waste days of labor, but he just smiles, chucks her chin, and
jumps into the milk to make love to her. After ol' Robbo passes that
test, she decides to trade all of his cows for a quilt.

Say what?

This
winds together with a sub-plot involving an old Maori magic woman of some kind and
her very well-dressed golfing nephews. Lucinda ran the old woman
over with a car while driving at full speed along a rural highway.
The old woman wasn't even bothered by the car thing, except that she
really needed to keep warm, so she had her nephews steal Lucinda's quilt ...

And that brings us back to the main
plot. So Rob now has a dairy farm with no cows at all, thus no way
to make a living. All he has to show for it is a quilt.

Oh, jeez, I just can't do any more of
this, and I guess it would be a spoiler if I told you more. The film
is actually quite cute if you like magic realism, but you better not
be one of those people who insists on a logical progression of
events, because the swap of a more than a hundred cows for a quilt,
a cardboard box with legs, and an old woman who cannot be killed are
actually some of the more earth-bound and sensible events in the
film. It is magical realism, and there is far more magic than
realism. In fact, now that I think about it, it is magic realism
without all that pesky realism.

The
Critics Vote

Roger Ebert 2/4. Mr Ebert was on the low end of
critical response. I'm guessing that the average was about
two and a half stars. See the MRQE link below for a quick
overview.

It played only in the most offbeat
arthouse theaters in the big markets. It grossed about
$100,000, never reaching more than five screens.

The meaning of the IMDb
score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics,
or a C- from our system.
Films rated below five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one
and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but
will be considered excellent by genre fans, while
C- indicates that it we found it to
be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for
fans of that type of film. Any film rated B- or better is
recommended for just about anyone. We don't score films below C-
that often, because we like movies and we think that most of
them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know
that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below
C-.

Based on this description, this is a C+. I generally don't like this kind of
movie at all, and I don't much care for magic realism, but I
have to admit that this film is engaging in a very strange and
indecipherable way. You might like it if you don't really care
whether movie events are plausible.